Quotes About Theater

The theater is a need for me. It's a terrible attraction, something I'm compelled to do. And one derives a form of nourishment from the theater which you can never get from films. Making films weakens you in some way. With the theater, the work itself is a regenerative process.

It is not enough to demand insight and informative images of reality from the theater. Our theater must stimulate a desire for understanding, a delight in changing reality. Our audience must experience not only the ways to free Prometheus, but be schooled in the very desire to free him. Theater must teach all the pleasures and joys of discovery, all the feelings of triumph associated with liberation.

I love theater. I think theater, when its done right, is the best, like a religious experience. When it is done badly, it's the worst thing. It's just an incredible experience.

I was 22 and stopped writing plays, and I didn't start again until I was 25. I was writing badly. In college, I attempted to write these more conventional plays, but the theater I loved was downtown experimental theater. I didn't feel like I could do that either. It didn't occur to me to do my own thing.

I grew up going to the theater. That was one of the nice things my mom did was she took us to plays and symphony concerts and to the museums. Theater captured my imagination. I just loved the idea of that box, which is essentially what a stage is from a certain distance, a box with all this life going on in it. So, I was eleven when I wrote my first play. Of course, it was horrible.

Theater doesn't bring money in general. That's not why you do it. If you go into theater for money then you've really gone into the wrong business.

When student-actors see people and the way they behave when together, see the color of the sky, hear the sounds in the air, feel the ground beneath them and the wind on their faces, they get a wider view of their personal world and development in the theater is quickened. The world provides the material for the theater and artistic growth develops hand-in-hand with one's recognition of it and one's self within it.

I did children's theater when I was younger, and then when I was about 14 I started doing theater in New York City.

I collaborated with a brilliant young sound designer named Anthony Mattana, who enriched the sound of the total production with vocal effects, percussive and other sounds. He also mixed the sound effects and the music, using the theater's first rate sound system to complement the theater's acoustics. This completed my score.

Good live theater disturbs molecules. You create an energy source around yourself and it alternates between you and the audience. Anybody who sees live theater should come out a little rearranged.

My whole background, my whole life was just lots and lots of theater, a lot of that being musical theater.

I come from the theater, and I've done a lot of character work in the theater, but Hollywood stuff in film and TV, they've been more leading lady/ingenue type roles.

There's theater in life, obviously, and there's life in theater.

I was always drawn to performing, but I never thought I could. I have no idea what I wanted to do outside of the old cowboy-or-fireman. When I was in college, I got serious about acting. I started examining history and then everything related to the theater. History, art, all the other studies, if I could link them into the theater, then it became alive for me. It just opened up my eyes.

I would love to [do theater], but there are go-to girls for theater. I am learning that, upon moving to New York and inquiring. There are go-to girls that will get the role any day of the week. It's true. Some people won't even let me audition.

My older sister has all her degrees in theater, and I couldnt stand the theater geeks!

People may know me from films, but theater is my first love. I did about 35 plays before I even landed my first screen role. I'm very comfortable on stage, and theater is not something you can just wing.

A lot of the time I hate the theater. You think, 'I have to climb Mount Everest, again, tonight.' Oh, the theater is a scary place to be.

Well, I couldn't play an instrument. I'd just stand up front and announce the numbers. They had me sing a little, but that was a horrible mistake. I can't carry a tune in a bucket. We played black theaters and nightclubs all over hell. One-nighters. Apollo Theater in Harlem and the Earle Theater in Philly - That was big time for blacks.

I've studied theater since high school. Of course, it's a different story altogether being on Broadway, but it's still theater, and you have to be in front of a live audience, and that's very exciting. It's something I've definitely wanted to do, but I got involved in movies and television, and then it became a luxury to get back on the stage.

For me, art is always a kind of theater. When I started the spot paintings I made them as an endless series. But I was never serious about it being an endless series. It was just an implied endless series. The theater means you just have to make it look good for that moment in the spotlight.

Going to the theater or having the honor of performing in theater reminds you of your humanity in a very different way. It's a real release and an incredible challenge. But the stage is a dangerous place. You gotta be trained. Plus, crowds like when things go wrong. I think that's part of the thrill. Anything can happen.

I am more alive in the theater than anywhere else, but what I take into the theater I get from the streets.

In the theater the audience is generally riveted to a single angle of observation. The movie director, though, can rapidly shift from objective to subjective--and to any number of subjective points of view--and in so doing seem to pull the audience directly inside the frame of his picture, giving the spectator the sense of experiencing an action from the viewpoint of a participant. Identification of the viewer with the film character, then, can be much more intimate than the analogous situation in the theater.

Although I performed in high school, my first real experience with theater was performing with a student-run organization at Vanderbilt University called The Original Cast where I learned that I loved performing and especially loved theater people.

My favorite thing to hear from people is, 'I left the theater and couldn't stop thinking about it.' You want your work to have an impact after they leave the theater. It's the equivalent of leaving a musical humming a show tune.

I've done a ton of theater work and dramatic work, but nobody really knows me that way.

It sounds corny to say, but the theater is sacred; something transcendent can occur, and when it does, everyone grows. It's a true communion.

I think that there is a real beauty to the live aspect of the theater, and the working with a director for a month on a script in the isolation of a room and really deeply delving into who are these people, what is the story we're telling, how do we want to tell it?

I have walked away from enormous amounts of money and I have made that life I have wanted somewhat in this business. I love doing independent film, I love doing theater, I love doing studio films, and I do all three now.

I'm lucky to have worked in theater all over the world, but there's something magical about Broadway. The audiences are smart, they're educated. They go in ready and they're up for it, they're up for the party. It's a whole different atmosphere.

I think the moment I discovered I definitely wanted to act was when I saw a play alone by myself when I was fourteen. Maybe it was a Moliere play? I discovered the atmosphere of the theater, and I knew I wanted to be an actor.

The advantage of horror books is to take the reader and cut him out of the pack and work on him one on one. It has its advantages because the people that are there in the movie theater really are a mob. If you get one guy alone you can do a more efficient job of scaring him.

I've always found as an actress that the best thing to do in film or TV or theater is just to lose yourself in it. Think of the story, the character, the worlds we're in, and forget everything else.

Gareth [Edwards] was very much about including everyone in what we were making, so he would cut together different scenes to show us what we were making. And the crew, cast, everyone would go into a theater there at Pinewood Studios and watch 10 minutes of what we were making. It was always so exciting. It looked amazing, and the music was huge.

A lot of what I've had produced are plays, and I just don't want to do that. It's different than a movie, where you only have to act the scenes the one time, and you have other collaborators helping you make it better, so you don't feel as obsessed with your own mind. Plays you have to do every single night, and the thought of that is agony to me. There are days when you hate your own work, and you don't want to be confronted with that, have it coming out of your mouth or listening to somebody else say it to you. There are days you want to leave the theater and get a drink.

I did an Off-Broadway show that was a comedy written by Ann Meara. We were like a family, and we did that show for a year. On Oz, I did feel like the cast members were friends and there was a lot of bonding. That said, there was a lot of testosterone. Once again, it was full of really intense theater actors with this writing that was really intricate and subtle.

Dustin Hoffman said this one time, that if he hadn't made it as a film star, he would still be happy as a character actor because he was a character actor because of his face from day one, so he would always work in the theater.

I perform regularly with a theater company called Outside the Wire who take performances of Greek tragedy to American-military audiences around the world to create discussion about PTSD and soldier suicide. It's one of the greatest things I've ever been asked to do as an actor.

All my roots are Broadway. I got my Equity Card doing a Broadway show, and my first love is theater.

Now in my theater training I showed no aptitude at all.

Good theater is not what is expected, but what surprises.

I was trained by Stella Adler for theater so you kind of give it all on every take.

I guess Ive been training in the theater for as long as I can remember.

I just needed a job. Before being hired as an usher at the CBS Theater, I didn't even know there was a show business.

I would love to do more movies. I'd like to get into some theater, too, if I could, just to learn more. I want to do gritty performances that I'm proud of. It doesn't matter to me if four people see it or millions of people see it, as long as I perform in such a way that people go, 'Wow!

The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theater.

When you are performing in theater, you feel so connected to your audience. Its exhilarating!